Separate as their audiences may seem, jazz and classical musicians have always kept an ear on each other and learned from each other. Charles Ives worked ragtime into his piano music in the 1890's; Scott Joplin, the king of ragtime, wrote an opera in 1911; "Duke" Ellington learned from the orchestration of Debussy and Ravel.

In the 1920's, jazz seemed like the necessary pedigree composers needed to make their music seem authentically American, and it does seem at times that a jazz sense of rhythm is our primary national musical distinction.

Inspired by erstwhile jazz figures like Rosco Mitchell and Muhal Richard Abrams, the free improvisation of the 1980's was the most thoroughgoing of many attempts to fuse two musical streams. For most of that decade, jazz and avant-garde music were nearly indistinguishable.